AMD is making some serious waves with its Ryzen 2, which provides some very serious competition for Intel's Coffee Lake series.

If you're thinking about building a new PC, AMD's new Ryzen 2 looks very tempting indeed.

Following the launch of the Ryzen series of processors last year, AMD has made some incredible strides forward into the high end processor market. The launch of the Ryzen 2 sees the continuation of this trend as AMD gains further ground on Intel, and releases a chip that might even knock the Intel i7 8700k off it's throne as the king of consumer processors.

When is the AMD Ryzen 2 release date?

The AMD Ryzen 2 will be up for pre-order on 13 April, with on shelf availability on 19 April this year. Pre-orders are available now from Overclockers (UK) and Amazon (US).

Along with having excellent performance, at an extremely competitive price, the second generation Ryzen processors will also come bundled with an extremely efficient cooler, which will put many after market coolers to shame.

When you consider the price point at which these processors are entering the market, their performance and the additional of a highly competent cooler – this is going to cause some major disruption for Intel. For the first time in a while, AMD has drawn level with Intel's current processor product offering, while also remaining at a lower price.

Will there be a Ryzen 7 2800X?

Many people were expecting the see the second generation of the 1800X, which was the top of the line offering from the first generation released last year.

However, for the moment the 2700X will remain the top offering in this series, as AMD feels that it has the market covered with this current product line up. This doesn't rule out the possibility of a 2800X in the future, but for the moment we won't be seeing one.

How does the Ryzen 2 series compare to the Ryzen 1?

The Ryzen 2 series makes use of Zen+ Architecture, which has a number of improvements over the Zen Architecture found in the first generation Ryzen processors.

With roughly 3% better IPC (instructions per cycle), and and up to an 11% decrease in memory latency across the board, AMD has focused on making the second generation not only run faster, but get more done with each cycle as too.

We have also seen a change in pricing strategy from AMD. Its top of the range consumer processors for the first generation, the Ryzen 7 1800X, retailed at around £499 / $499, with the 1700X and 1700 at £399 / $399 and £329 / $329 respectively.

The 2700X from the second generation retails at £299 / $329, which is a rather massive drop, especially since all of the second generation CPUs feature a cooler as standard.

The performance of these processors, the additional of a great cooler in the box and their price point is making them extremely attractive.

Ryzen 7 2700X vs Intel 8700k

The benchmarks that we've seen suggest that for programs that use a single core, the top offering from both AMD and Intel fall with a 1% performance difference of each other. So for operations such as gaming that favour fewer, faster cores over several, slower cores these processors will sit just about neck and neck.

This has historically always been a space where Intel has won out, as their individual cores were always more powerful in comparison. This advantage has waned considerably, down to essentially nothing at this point.

In multithread applications, such as video editing and rendering, the Ryzen 7 2700X sees around a 20% increase in speed over the 8700k. This is largely thanks to more cores as the 6 core / 12 thread 8700k will have a hard time keeping up with the raw power of the 8 core / 16 thread 2700X.

This level of difference is certainly not insignificant either. A 5 or even 10% difference between the two could be shrugged off, but a 20% lead is a substantial advantage for an offering that both comes with it's own cooler, and even with that, is still a cheaper solution.

Our full review of the second generation Ryzen series will be up very shortly, where we will post our own findings on the new hardware. Untill then though, these chips are looking extremely promising and provide a great alternative to the consumer against Intel's product line up.